High Agency

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:00:00] Always wanted to be an entrepreneur.  I just felt like maybe this is not the right kind of field to be an entrepreneur.  I mean, look at it.  It's just too academic and boring and I don't know.  So I went and asked one of my friends.  I said, hey, do you think I should start a company and do this thing?  And he said, OK, if you want a piece of advice from me, I want to tell you this.  Close your eyes.  And I closed my eyes and he said, think of yourself in two years.  Do you want to be doing this work?  And I closed my eyes and I thought about it.  I'm like, no, man, I don't.  I don't think I want to do this.  It's just it doesn't feel right.  And I'm so glad I didn't listen to that advice.  You know, I think it's the fact that you are dealing with something every day that it just becomes interesting for.  And more and more you start to realize that, wow, people do not really know this amazing science that goes into our home and has to do with our well-being.  It has to do with our comfort and how much we are missing out by not really looking at that science and not bringing it to the masses.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:01:20] Welcome to High Agency.  Igniting conversations with inspiring people.  Leading transformative change.  In a world where our energy needs are increasing, a quiet revolution is brewing.  And as climate change tightens its grip, imagine buildings that are so efficient, they sip power rather than guzzling it, leaving scarcely a carbon footprint.  Now, this isn't some distant fantasy.  It's actually the battleground where visionaries are scaling innovations.  And showing us.  That a better way is actually possible now, governments who are not exactly known for swift action are actually rolling out regulations and incentives faster than contractors can have cost overruns.  For instance, British Columbia is pushing toward net-zero energy-ready buildings by 2032.  And that's setting a precedent that's pretty hard to ignore.  Now, behind all this are trailblazers who wrestle industry and bureaucracies towards tangible change.  One such maverick is Arman Motaghi, founder and CEO of Properate.  And that's a tech company that's redefining energy efficiency in residential buildings.  Arman's journey from immigrant to innovator is a testament to relentless grit and visionary thinking.  Under his leadership, Properate has partnered with the province of B.  C., assisting over 200 builders in constructing more energy-efficient homes.  Their technology has influenced thousands of projects, each one averaging the elimination of six tons of greenhouse gases annually. And it's initiatives like these that earned Arman the Canada Green Building Council's Emerging Green Leader Award in 2021.  So if we stand on the precipice of a sustainable future, it's pioneers like Arman who are lighting the path forward.  Arman, I'm so glad to have you on today.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:03:26] Great to be here.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:03:27] So how are you?

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:03:28] How are things going?  It's actually pretty great to wake up every day and do something you like.  There are some bumps in the road.  I got a flood in my shower the other day.  Just trying to live life, I guess.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:03:48] Don't feel too guilty about that water usage, I guess.  So when we're talking about this, I think it's important to keep in mind that we're all in this together.  Earlier, you mentioned that you didn't really have a passion for your field, that's kind of interesting because normally, anybody who goes into sustainability, something environmental, they've had some interest in quote-unquote saving the planet, green initiatives, you know, giving back in some way.  So, you didn't start off with a passion for this field, but I think it's safe to say you've found one.  So how did this all start for you?

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:04:21] Yeah, that's a great question and I think it's I'm really glad you started with this because when I started out it was really discouraging for me that you look at sources of inspiration like a TED talk and all of them start with 'when I was a kid, you know, so and so happened the visionary pioneer story', yeah.  And then, I saw this thing and I knew biology is for me, and I, you know, I was a kid, you know, so and so happened the visionary pioneer story right And then, and I, I saw this thing and I knew biology is for me and I, didn't really have that like when I was 25, I really didn't have that like 'okay, I really want to enter this field'  and 'I want to do this amazing work it was sort of accidental  That I ended up in the field of building science when I was applying for university after I immigrated to Canada.  I wanted to do something construction-related because that was what my dad's field was-shout out to my dad, by the way!  I looked at the programs available here and saw one of them was building science at BCIT for a master's degree.  It was like, 'Okay, it should be similar to civil engineering, you know I looked it up; how much do you know before you enter a field?  So I entered, and I found it quite interesting but also kind of antiquated-this software we were using, the sort of work we were doing.  It was really, really targeting  A problem that was really important.  But the amount of stuff you had to do to just do one simple thing in an academic environment wasn't really allowing this to go into the market and be impactful.  And then I learned about the history of it.  All of the bits and pieces that have happened over the past 50 years.  But then, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.  I just felt like maybe this is not the right kind of field to be an entrepreneur.  I mean, look at it.  It's just too academic and boring.  And I don't know.  So I went and asked one of my friends.  I said, hey, do you think I should start a company and do this thing?  And he said, okay, if you want a piece of advice from me, I'm going to tell you this.  Close your eye.  And I closed my eyes.  And he said, think of yourself in two years.  Do you want to be doing this work?  And I closed my eyes and I thought about it.  I'm like, no, man.  I don't think I want to do this.  It's just, it doesn't feel right.  And I'm so glad I didn't listen to that advice.  I think it's the fact that you are dealing with something every day that makes it interesting for you.  And more and more, you're starting to realize that you're not doing it.  You're starting to realize, wow, people do not really know this amazing science that goes into our home and has to do with our well-being.  It has to do with our comfort.  And how much we're missing out by not really looking at that science and not bringing it to the masses.  So I started that workout.  I really didn't know who else would be interested in it.  And I really didn't know who else is going to be interested in it.  Didn't start any day by saying I'm gonna go make a lot of money, and I'm gonna have a lot of sales.  But thankfully the uh the numbers kept coming through, and uh now we are a sustainable growing cash flow positive business, and it's really like living the dream, uh so yeah, so you know I don't know, I can't really tell you like what passion can do or can't do, but I can tell you that there are more than the one pathway to entrepreneurship than um the one that is usually shown in the movies or uh you know in in the typical like conversations that you have a moment of inspiration.  Sometimes it's really methodical, like that.  I don't know if you can relate but from what I know of you, you started from software and you ended up here, so maybe there is something for you to relate to.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:08:39] There I only relate to your story because I am so sure, and I'm not joking at all when I say this-anything meaningful I've done in my life um if I look back now and I think  about it if i had thought about it in that moment i wouldn't have done it and much like you i think sometimes you get started on something and you're you're kind of pulling on a thread you're pulling on a thread and you're pulling on a thread and you're pulling on a thread and you're pulling on a thread and after a while you look back you're like oh wow i've traveled a long ways yeah like well maybe let's keep pulling so my agency skyrocket for me was that um and yes i did start life as a as a software developer and i was in technology early on uh did that for about 10 years but started when i was very very young more as kind of like a  um, nerdy teenager right working with computers and just some early scripting, early days of the web, all that sort of stuff, and eventually that life actually took me to California, I worked in Silicon Valley for a couple of years, came back, continued with that life, um but left it behind and quite instinctually just kind of went into advertising and it was years after that that you know again you just start pulling on a thread; I had no intention of starting an agency, I had no intention of even, you know, quote unquote being an entrepreneur, but I think had enough of an interest in making change in some places, whether it was  You know, starting a music and dance festival many, many years ago or this agency it was just an interest in in seeing something happen and you start pulling on a thing and eventually, oh, oh wow, we made a thing right.  So no, I very much relate to that founder story more than the passionate visionary with a dream, and you know, a new world I wanted to create.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:10:23] I love that analogy and I might steal that from you; I mean, it's on record, I guess.  Uh, but the pulling on the thread because I think there is another aspect to it that you are kind of like, what do you need to do to get to where you want to be, alluding to, is that the thread is also pulls you.  Know the laws of physics is that you're pulling and you're getting an opposite force so it's not like you are going somewhere random, it's like you are understanding what the society, the market, the people need and you're working towards filling that gap even if it's not somewhere you really saw yourself in the first place, that's that's an amazing analogy, yeah and I think sometimes those are some of the most interesting places right because based on I don't know upbringing, uh family background, the environment you're raised in, sometimes we lack the imagination to meet maybe even see completely what's possible.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:11:20] Right, um, so it's nice to be surprised in your own life, like 'oh, I didn't, I didn't know this, this was the way'  right and it sounds like that's what uh something so mundane right because at a distance, Building Sciences, sorry to say it yeah sounds pretty freaking boring right, it it abbreviates to BS hopefully it's more than that now, yeah uh but at a distance it sounds pretty um yeah, like you know um kind of dry perhaps um but you've found a passion in it and turned it into something quite interesting which kind of meets the moment as well right, uh we know that you know international conferences happen there's a lot of dialogue  And conversation and all sorts of controversy around carbon tax, you name it, but just the practical aspect of there's a foundational thing about how we live, which is the spaces we occupy, and so starting there to make an impact is is pretty profound, yeah.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:12:18] And there is so much that we take for granted, like um, whenever you say buildings people think of the high rises in the downtown core, like where we are right now, but that's just a small fraction of all the buildings-the really long tail are those homes that are built over the past decades, the mistakes that we have already made, and we have to go fix them because we have  created environments that due to circumstance due to the needs of the time are not really tuned to our needs and also the sustainability of the society people get surprised that one of the reasons we have sprawl in our outside of our downtown core was out of atomic bomb fears really yeah i had no idea i just thought it was like lazy zoning or something that you know they didn't think about it and yeah but you know there is a there is a variety of factors that bring all of that together of course automobile and how uh owning land has always been something important for people but yeah a lot of it was like if this city is going to  get nuked let people be far away from from it right it's it's really real when you think about it that way but also it's not something that we can just like build our way out of it's great to work on buildings that are very efficient it's it's very important work right but like when you say we have a building that is lead platinum or like this this building is really efficient that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the work we are doing for our grandchildren because by the time they are living on earth that kind of building is going to be normal but for ourselves unfortunately we have to retrofit the buildings  We already have because we are not going to build enough to replace them.  One of my professors used to say, 'Eighty percent of all the buildings you will ever see in your life have already been built.'  Right?  The building we are in was built a very long time ago, yeah.  So this building in particular, a very long time-a very long time ago.  So this area used to be a pipe factory, I think if I recall correctly.  This crane and the bricks should be locally made, and it was a very different landscape when they built it.  These are things I've never thought about, I've never thought about where these bricks come from, but now.  That you say it it's very interesting, yeah it's there's a lot of history here, I used to frequent one of the adjacent buildings and I know that history.  If you go in front of the whole complex, you see the the sign of the company that used to be here, and then they had to come and put these slabs, they had to make it seismically more reliable, and then create an environment for people to to work at, you know um it's it's a huge challenge the retrofitting work.  I always wondered when you have cars that are you know gas and they are maybe older, the engine is not working as well how hard is it just take that out and retrofit it make a different  Thing or put a backup camera inside the cars; in mass, they can't do it at scale for cars that are all built the same.  Like you, you have millions of the same model built now.  Imagine we want to solve this problem for houses which are different every one of them-unique to its own needs and what turns out to be the truth unfortunately is that you really need to understand every building individually to understand what is the best path to retrofit it.  If you put a dollar in retrofitting a house, an apartment or a townhouse, you could go from doing a lot of work or completely wasting the money; and to make that matter.  Sense I'm going to give you an analogy, imagine you're going skiing on a very cold winter day and you're in shorts but you're in a jacket like you're comfortable on the jacket but you're in shorts.  Do you feel like you're gonna enjoy that skiing adventure?  I mean, depends on the day, but generally probably not very likely it's like you're gonna be so...  I'm gonna give you another jacket, right?  You're gonna put another one on will you be comfortable?  No, you won't be, and no matter how many jackets I give you, the problem is the shorts.  Right?  The same thing happens with our homes: you have windows that are leaking a lot of energy.  Out and then somebody comes to you and says, 'You need to upgrade your furnace that's not the problem, right?  If you add installation to your ceiling, that's not the problem.  It's the bare legs or a that are those windows or a smart thermostat, smart thermostat, oh my god!  That one is good in many scenarios, but like you have a house that has mold and has leaks and has rodents running in the walls, and it's like, 'It's the worst indoor environment.  Uh, the air is not, you know, ventilating really well and they slap a smart thermostat on it and say, 'This is a smart home.'  That's what we did here; we got a smart thermostat and felt.  great you know i i'm kind of judgmental about buildings i come in and i'm like oh this isn't that yours is okay like you have a double glazed uh pretty sealed nicely windows your ventilation is good so uh you pass my generally eyeball test of the kind of office space you have but yeah the smart thermostat needs to come off again these are things i've never thought of this space ever i've never thought about how many glazes our window has well why is that domo it's like there is this survival rule um that i have semi-recently learned that's three three three are you familiar with that no so it says if you don't eat food for three  weeks you are going to perish if you don't drink water for three days you are going to perish but if you cannot breathe well for three months you are going to die minutes right you are going to perish and i think about it and i'm like okay when it comes to food we always talk about our nutrition people know what a vitamin is we go on diets right we do all of those stuff when it comes to water we talk about you know hydration i have my glass here we talk a lot about the things that go in our water our water supplies what about our air like that's the most important one it's crazy that we're not talking enough and i saw you took a deep breath  Because it's just like human, it's like oh like what am I breathing right now unfortunately in a lot of cases we have a ton of work to do to make the indoor environment of our homes, our houses, apartments, townhouses better.  There are volatile compounds that are coming from off-gassing of the stuff in our home or just our skin shedding and creating dust or as you're walking on the floor, you know small particles come out pollutants can come from the outside from the cars and all of those things.  The air inside our home, uh not just in terms of its cleanness but in terms of its temperature, the way it hits our skin can create a very different  Comfort profile, and more than that it's radiation.  So if the walls of your home is cold are cold, and if the roof, the ceiling, they are like not radiating energy to you, you will feel uncomfortable.  This is uh, you know every every object glows, and that's why you can see yourself in those you know infrared cameras.  We glow; we just aren't warm enough to glow like the sun, right?  We just glow like a smaller amount, and same is for the walls on the and the floor when we glow to them, and they don't glow back enough, we feel uncomfortable really.  Yeah, there is a lot of science into how to make the surface of that wall a little bit warmer and  You make it warmer by putting the insulation on the outside, maybe, and creating this nice gradient.  And when you do that, right, you don't need to warm up the air as much.  You know, in a warehouse, uh, sometimes I don't know if you've been to but there's this thing called the heat of the sun and it's radiating heaters and the door of the garage or the warehouse is wide open, but you feel comfortable because it's radiating to you; it's giving you heat just like the sun.  All of those things they create a really big impact.  There is research that shows for kids in school, they get better math scores when you have better quality ventilation.  In the classroom, they have more attentive; they miss fewer days due to sickness.  The same thing happens in our home, especially after the pandemic, people are spending all of their time in their homes. And if you talk about that 3-3-3 rule, yeah, you may think about your diet a lot, you may think about your water a lot, but you feel uncomfortable and you're having a lower quality of life because the air you're breathing in is instantly impacting you.  And we have extreme examples of that.  There is this story of this lady on Reddit that she was seeing sticky notes everywhere in her apartment; she was thinking that her apartment  Has a ghost like that was the level she was thinking that things are wrong that she was seeing the sticky notes so after a couple of weeks somebody told her check your furnace they learned that the furnace had a defect that was putting in carbon monoxide in the space and I learned that the furnace had a defect that was putting in carbon monoxide in the space not at a level that was lethal but at a level that was just making her mind not function properly.  So she was basically high on carbon monoxide and she was seeing sticky notes everywhere.  That's our brain, right?  Our brain is really not aware of the quality of the air it gets, but it really affects it.  It really affects how it functions.  And that's why, on the airplanes, they tell you to put on your oxygen mask first before putting on someone else's, because you're sitting there and your eyes are open, you are seemingly alert, but you cannot move your hands.  You cannot take action.  Some people are even smiling when they are lacking oxygen, but they cannot understand they have to put on the oxygen mask, otherwise they're going to die.  You know, there are like these videos on YouTube about like, people liking shouting in their ear, you have to put on your oxygen mask.  And the person is just not, uh, just not responding out of a test lab in the, uh, in the U.  S but yeah, all of those things are what may, are the things that make me really passionate about building science or, you know, it doesn't really abbreviate to like, it's, it's not really BS when you think about it.  And I think more people need to know, and more people need to be familiar.  With these concepts, we are familiar with the concept of vitamins and proteins and carbohydrates and the water quality.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:24:30] Yeah.  I mean, this is blowing my mind a little bit because, uh, one, I'm a little worried about increasing paranoia about my environment now.  Uh, but no, I, I've never thought about it because we hear about air quality, right?  So when I hear the word air quality, I think about forest fires, NBC, I think about, um, past visits to New Delhi or, you know, Lahore, Pakistan.  And I'm like, okay, air quality is this big, you know, citywide issue, right?  And that's what we need to look for.  Uh, just never thought about it in the environment of the home or this idea of, you know, uh, radiating surfaces, uh, to create comfort.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:25:09] I have to say, we are so lucky in Vancouver to be living in a place that a lot of these things are figured out.  Same story for me.  I come from a very polluted city.  Sometimes in the winter, they close down schools and offices just because it's not healthy to breathe.  And it's as if, like staying at home is going to do anything.  No, um, you could do a lot of work with air filtration in that situation and air-tightening your home.  So even in the, in the work of a forest fire, if you have an indoor environment that is tuned to you, it can filter out all of those particles and still make it a comfortable environment for you.  However, I think it's also important to think about the actions we take, not just in terms of like immediate, like, you know, Vancouver's air can be fairly clean, but in certain points in your life, you have to take actions that come into, for example, replacing your heating system or making a certain choice about your living environment.  And if you're aware of what choice is better for you, you can make a choice about your living environment.  And if you're aware of what choice is better for you, then you don't have to listen to somebody because you know them from your high school, right?  And I think those are the very impactful things.  Then you have this one level, which is the homeowners that they need to be aware.  Then you come to the contractors or the people who are coming to your home and they are trying to give you advice.  And a lot of times they have done something for 30 years, and that's the knowledge they have, that's the expertise they know.  But the building science field has shifted a lot.  You know, somebody comes to your home and they want to make a modification.  If they do it in a just a newer, better way, it might not cost you anymore, but it's just going to be better value.  And there is a lot of education there, but sometimes they're not at fault.  They just don't have the right tools.  So we have put a ton of effort into cramming $35,000 worth of engineering equipment into an iPhone and an iPad so that when the person goes on site, they use the LIDAR module on the iPhone to scan the building, detect the windows and the walls and everything, and figure out where the bare leg, you know, in the skiing example, where the weakest points of the building is and provide suggestions based on that.  And more than that, we have profiled energy efficiency solutions such as different types of installations, different types of mechanical systems, and good practices to use them in a report that they can show the homeowner in a very engaging way and say for your home specifically, which is unique to you, this is the best solution to go forward.  Unfortunately, even at that scale, you have a lot of costs that go into doing things a certain way.  And then, ultimately, you just kind of building energy upgrade that's just a fact of the amount of work necessary there, so the next level you have to involve and this is like exactly the progression of our company over the past few years that I'm telling you.  The next level you have to involve is the governments or the utilities-they have a ton of money spent on demand side management for example, the utility; they do not want to build another dam or build another pipeline; they don't; they want to just manage the energy, just manage the energy; serve more customers with the amount of energy they have and they also have mandates to do that work so they are putting you know one of them in BC is putting 600 million dollars, a significant amount of money over the next few years to do energy upgrades demand side management work of all kinds-some of it goes to residential, some of it goes to commercial; we have shown that the work they are doing.  in the allocation for the residential buildings is not really optimized to the needs that are happening at the contractor and the homeowner level we see a house that you could upgrade you could cut emissions by 50 you could significantly reduce their energy usage and this home can be can do it really cheaply but when the program is defined by the utility or by the government they think about the building components so for example we have the canada greener homes program which is a federal program that gives grants for homeowners for doing energy upgrades and we have you know programs in bc programs in all levels of  government across canada that is either local governments or provincial governments they are like okay if you're changing your windows i'm gonna pay you a hundred and fifty dollar per window as a rebate so that you can make that upgrade the challenge is that if the window is that weakest link maybe that money is not really enough and for the homes that we looked at we saw if this money that was allocated for this home was just directed enough directed in the right direct in the right direction then you would have a lot of money for the wind I hope that's true would have a very cost-effective energy upgrade way more impact  Very more very more, impact instead of saying 'I can't pay you five thousand dollars for the ceiling if you want, I can't pay you you know, a thousand dollars for this thing if you want.  No, just like put it all in a pot of money and then we do a building energy modeling, which also has a fascinating history, and we can't get into it but we can do a building energy model of this home and we can tell you where this money should go.  So the three levels of impact is the government/slash/enterprise, is the contractors, is the homeowners.  All of these need to come together to create I think a Canada that has a hundred percent efficient sustainable.  Retrofitted buildings, we are working towards that in in any way we can and we are working with the BC government on the government side, we are working with a variety of contractors with the new tool that we have and with other tech that we have, and we are also working with many homeowners to just understand what they want, drives them and what creates that impact.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:31:52] The concept of building science does it make sense to them so so what you communicated there is like a really clear and rich vision right but it took you some time to arrive at that vision and so when did you kind of get that clarity right, like you know when you were  Starting off again, going back to the pulling on the thread analogy right, um, there must have been some challenges, right, because nobody pulls on the thread and goes 'boom', you know, business model vision done, so what were the challenges when you were trying to figure out your way of bringing about this change?

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:32:26] Yeah, I think it's a really great question.  I think uh, the way we started was from actually new construction before even realizing it was from the retrofits, and then you know, we were trying to figure out how to bring about this change, so we started by, you know, impacting the that contractor level, and then realizing that  No, like you actually might relate to this, that you know as the work that engineering work that happens a lot of it is actually about how you communicate it and I think the the work that you folks are doing in the Skyrocket is is around that like communication piece which is like significantly harder than it meets the eye; it's like oh yeah you just like make a nice report, like what, how is it well people don't know what a gigajoule means, yeah right, so you have to go and start like putting it in the context that they understand but it it was really hard to learn these things and understand these things and it was really hard to figure  Out of those are the things that don't scale, like those are the things that we have to do first.  But beyond property's mission, I think Property Story is a Vancouver startup that is fully employee-owned.  It is cash flow positive.  It never raised venture capital and we have a social purpose mandate.  It's really living the dream every day, that I wake up, I have two groups of people that I need to serve, and that is our employees and our clients and nobody else, that's amazing right?  But one of the biggest challenges I had when I entered the field of entrepreneurship in Vancouver was looking at the conventional wisdom, you know it's it's  Just the same as if you try to go to become an actor or go and try to learn how to amortize buildings or whatever you go and look at what people do, right?  What are the pieces that people have?  And the first thing they tell you is that you have to have a pitch deck, you have to go talk to investors and venture capitalists, that's what we did, that's what I did.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:34:36] I was like, okay, this is the conventional wisdom, these are the things, let me go and do it, yeah, there are 10,000 blog articles about it, there are probably thousands of podcasts about it, yeah, yeah.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:34:48] And that's exactly so it's like, okay, well, this is just how things are.  Um, and it took me a while.  To realize that I'm not really getting that traction from the investor community, I remember pandemic time, we were at a pitch event, we had our pitch deck, you know it's like 'Okay, what is your pitch deck?  What is your pitch deck?'  Your total addressable market, what are your projections for the year 2027 or something.  I remember there was this company that was doing that. They were building houses in the metaverse and selling them as NFTs, and then there were us upgrading buildings in the real world, like fools, yeah...  What were we thinking?  And I want you to get, like, you don't have to really  Tell them, but it's I mean you know which company the investors but 100 yeah we're all around and I really because what could be more energy efficient than like an imaginary house yeah and that you can't sell us an NFT you know it's just it's everything um and it's it's those experiences that I that it was it was eye-opening and to your great analogy of pulling on the thread, the thread it was like I was seeing that I'm going much further by finding amazing customers by finding the regional district of Okanagan Similkameen that is just wants to roll out this product for all of their the people in the in the in their district.  Than going and finding right investors, explaining to them why the work we are doing is important.  Then all of a sudden we had money, and it was kind of like this veil was lifted off my eye that was yeah like, 'Why do I need to first go and learn to sell to investors, then and then go on to start learning what I want to do?'  I still think you know going after venture capital is important for some startups, but nowhere near the majority.  I think we need to start to think about a new vision because a lot of the wisdom we have about startups is coming from the year 2009, 2007, 2009, right?  That was where Y-Combinator started, right, and there  Was this massive boom of technology, and you needed people to go out there and start selling.  I describe it as if you were the first person who discovered hot sauce, like spicy food didn't exist before you.  So you apply the hot sauce on a cucumber and everybody hates it, but you apply it on Cheetos and everybody loves it and it doesn't make any sense.  So what do you do?  You go and find the people who can put more hot sauce onto more things, right?  And instead of you having to go and try to figure out like how to do everything yourself, you give a little bit of money to this person, a little bit of money to that person, and you create this environment where everybody goes everywhere and they try it on everything, right?  And that hot sauce in the case of Silicon Valley was tech.  They just picked up anything they found and they sprinkled tech on it and they saw if it goes forward or not.  And that's where 'fail fast, fail often'  came from, right?  Because if you go into the medical fields and you try something and it doesn't work, well, then go to the financial sector and see if it works because you are one of the few people who understand that.  But also we have to realize how much of a difference there is in today's world and that time. Yeah.  I remember in school, one of our professors in, in college, he came in and said, who here knows how to code?  And I was the only one who raised my hand.  And I said, I can't code Python.  And he's like, come meet me after, right?  It was, people were listening to you, right?  If you sat there and you said, told anybody, I want to make an app for you, they would be like, wait, you can make my phone do something other than call and calculator?

SPEAKER_2

[00:39:33] Like, how are you going to do?  That you might be some sort of a wizard or something.  And it's not like that today anymore, right?

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:39:41] Today, all of those paths of least resistance they have been explored.  There are of course, new areas like AI.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:39:49] I was going to say, isn't AI kind of like the new hot sauce, right?

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:39:52] Yeah.  It's a new hot, exactly.  It's a new hot sauce.  There is AI that you, again, go in the same way.  You sprinkle it on everything and see if it works.  Yeah.  If you're an AI startup, sure.  Like fill your boots.  Yeah.  But if it's clean tech, I think a lot of times, if you don't have that huge financial need for capital, it makes a ton more sense to first go and figure out what is possible than to go and promise investors something that you think is possible and then go try to execute on it.  Because the thing that doesn't scale first, and that's the best advice I've ever seen, do the thing that doesn't scale first, right?  The thing that doesn't scale is really you understanding how you can solve that climate challenge.  And that's, I think, how we went about it when we had the time and the money.  We spent a ton of time understanding the history of building energy modeling in Canada, which surprisingly comes from the oil crisis of 1972.  What?  Yeah.  It's insane, isn't it?  So when oil, the oil crisis happened, and I'm so grateful that you have the programming knowledge because I want to talk about punch card computers.  And I don't know how I can explain them.  So maybe you can help me a little bit.  I'll try.  Sure.  So the oil crisis happens and it's the first time that people are aware of, okay, well, we need to improve things and we need to reduce the gas in our cars.  But guess what?  Another source, are the buildings.  Well, how do we improve buildings?  The thing that happens in the building is really complex.  And those, you know, the bare legs, the least path of heat resistance that escapes, you need to model that because you cannot just go and say, okay, this is my window, this is my wall, and that's how they're going to work together.  It's like a combination of these factors that all of them create your home.  So they use the punch card computers of the time to start to figure out how buildings work.  It was one of the areas they were applying the computers to.  It was Apollo era computers that did a computer technology that they applied.  And it was the same for weather forecasting and all of those things.  So they would like create these models in punch cards.  Now I can't, I don't know how to explain exactly explain that to an audience what a punch card computer is.  So maybe you can help me with that.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:42:41] Yeah.  It's, it's hard to describe because I mean, our, our orders of magnitude, like the scale is so massive now.  Right.  But yeah, it's like, imagine what, like, you know, every letter of code that had to go into a computer for every letter, basically you had to put holes into a piece of cardboard.  Whereas, you know, now we have languages.  We have AI, we have machine learning.  It's exponentially more complex and faster and everything else.  But yeah, there was a time when every instruction was a single instruction and it had to be holes punched into a card that you fed in.  Yeah.  And just incredibly slow.  Yeah.  Yeah.  It's, it's, it's clunky and slow.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:43:22] Very analog. Yeah.  And for some reason, like Canada was a pioneer in that field.  And we, for some reason, stopped at some point.  You know, when the Apollo computers started improving, like I think at the time, if you had told somebody that someday you can land a rocket, they would have been like, you know, mesmerized by the fact, but that technology improved the building simulation, even though the physics is the same, it didn't improve as much.  So today, the main tool used for building energy simulation, building an energy rating in Canada for residential buildings, low-rise residential buildings is called HOT2000.  HOT2000?  Amazing name, right?  And it comes, as you can imagine, it comes from the, a year that 2000 was far in the future enough that they named it as such.  It comes from the government of Canada.  And the, the main code base, the core of it, where it's four transients, it's called Trans64.  Oh, wow.  When you open it on a computer, like you, when you want to type for Trans64, every line you have to press space six times, because that was in the punch card for the go-to instructions of the code in that language.  So this is today, this is the status quo of energy rating.  Now it has a lot going for it because physics is physics.  Like a lot of the things that are going on in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the airs.  HOT2000?  All right, now let's do this with this open-source version of Weals Paint.  HOT2000 really got into us, didn't you yourselves?  I can make assumptions all the time.  No, no.  So far, HOT2000, okay.  energy rating of homes in an entire area or an estimate of it, how can I even make that happen with a software that was built with that technology, right?  So what we did as Properate was that we went and really understood this history, right?  Better than anybody else.  Sounds like it.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:45:53] Yeah.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:45:53] I would have never known.  It was a hell of a ride.  And not only we understand it, we became compatible with it.  So if you go to our website, there is a section that we ask you, where is your home?  And you put in your address.  Then we look at public data and we try to make an idea of your home, that energy model.  And then we ask you maybe 10 questions that you can answer to make that energy model as close as possible to reality as we can make it.  We give you some insights that we call them remote ratings.  A lot of people call them remote ratings.  And if you like that, you can then have somebody come to your site, to your home, use that Lidar camera, scan your home, and make another more advanced model.  And it gives you all the insights.  However, all of these things can be exported to Hot 2000.  Wow.  To that 50-year-old software.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:46:46] That's backwards compatibility.  Yeah.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:46:47] Right.  So you had to make it because you cannot just go to people and say, this is a new thing, use it.  We say we have absolute compatibility and comfort with Verde Industries.  And then we have created a point of departure.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:47:06] So it's interesting for two points here, because there's a couple of things that you're doing and thinking that are kind of counterintuitive to startup culture, right?  First is just even in how you got started with going out to get the customer and do the thing that doesn't scale.  But the second is, rather than having like the disruption message, there's a real cohesion message there of saying, we want this to be a real thing.  We want this to be adopted, right?  We want it to be accessible.  So rather than coming in and saying, everything you're doing is shit and garbage and you got to throw it away.  And here's the sexy new thing of saying, we're going to come in and be cohesive, right?  I imagine that that would have helped adoption a lot or accessibility for the government even.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:47:45] Yeah, a hundred percent.  And you can imagine like there were folks coming in before us and they were trying to make this drop from inside and outside of the government, just disrupt the process.  But because you're not speaking the same language and you are not understanding the language, you're not understanding the language, you're not understanding the language, you're not understanding the priorities; they weren't getting any headway.  If we were coming and saying, 'this is our own process'  or 'this is our own rating', people were like, 'Well, why do we have to be in your ecosystem?'  But what we can do instead right now, we can say, hey, this is all of the files you need for your compliance.  But hey, by the way, the weather information in this technology is from 20 years ago, right?  From the past 20 years.  But if you are installing a heat pump in someone's home, you are not doing it for 20 years ago, you're doing it for 20 years in the future.  So here is an enhanced version of the same thing.  Because we have all of this knowledge, we have like bent and swapped the pieces that are outdated.  And we are telling you to install a system that has such and such configurations so that it's resilient and it's future-proof, right? All right.  So all of those little pieces is like the things that you can add.  And I'm hoping that as time goes forward with enough public and private sector interest, we can create an environment where we can take back that leadership.  It's amazing, when you hear the story of 1970s, they were thinking about this stuff.  The passive house movement has origins in Canada.  When I go back and see where we we are with our government action and with private sector action, I think we are primed to create another leapfrog movement in understanding our buildings and creating a massive industry where it's all around retrofitting buildings.  And guess what?  When the rest of the world wakes up to this fact, just like how Germany took over the idea of the passive house and started to really standardize it, when the rest of the world wakes up to this fact, we have a technology and a structure to export, right?  So we create a very successful domestic industry that just takes over a global market when people are like, wow, the heat wave is causing a lot of devastation now.  People need to do something about it.  And we come and say, you know what?  It doesn't start from adding an AC.  It actually starts from you buying windows with a special, special coating that doesn't allow the sun rays from coming in so that your space remains cooler.  And you adding certain kind of overhangs on top of your windows so that when the sun is low in the winter, it comes in.  But when it goes high in the summer, it gets blocked and you are cooler, right?  All of these things are, is a massive industry.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:50:49] That's a huge opportunity because I would say, you know, as the casual observer, like I'm not, you know, from the building science, area or frankly, even environmental beyond just being, you know, a person in society who hears the same message as everybody else does.  Most of the associations that I would have around construction and environmentalism or sustainability are from kind of like the lead era.  And so what happens in my mind as I immediately think of something that is restrictive and expensive, right?  It's like to be environmental and sustainable, you've got to slow things down and it's going to be more expensive, right?  And that's a tough message for anybody to swallow, right?  And, but those are the, like if there was a brand around sustainable buildings, unfortunately, that's kind of the brand, right?  Is that it's going to be slow and expensive.  And if there's a way of like not disrupting the process, but disrupting the brand of environmental and sustainable buildings, that is, I think what's really exciting about property, right?  And that's a really interesting take on it.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:51:48] Yeah.  And, and I think that happens gradually, right?  I think if, if you were somebody living in the 15th century and you were thinking that your health is done through humors and alignment of stars, right?  And then I came and told you, now you need to change up your lifestyle.  You need to filter your water.  You need to eat nutrition.  You would be overwhelmed with everything I'm telling you, right?  What happens is we need to create incremental change, right?  We need to increase the knowledge of people, but also when it's time for them to make a change in their home, we need to have everything aligned.  We need to have the governance incentives, the best advice and everything.  Yeah.  Yeah.  But you put it better than how I could have ever put it in, right?  So the, the work is really around, around aligning those stars together.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:52:38] Are you taking the opportunity to talk about, um, because I mean, it's, it's clear how excited you are about the work, right?  But are you taking the opportunity to talk about your approach?  Because I think there's a lot to be learned from, you know, even the comment you made around funding models being different or the approach you took with going through it.  Because I can tell you that seems counterintuitive to me, right?  If, if we were working on some sort of technology solution, again, the government is often looked upon and seen as, you know, slow to move, highly bureaucratic.  And so my first advice even to you wouldn't have been, Hey, go to a municipality and try to sell them the solution.  But that's what you guys did.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:53:18] Again, like it was really around pulling the threads, but there was also another piece to it.  I think is that, you know, we didn't really ask any questions about like, who we are talking to.  We just talk with anybody who, who had listened.  But there is also that I think we are thinking too much in the present nowadays, the whole like media cycle and investment markets.  It's just, everything is about now, right?  Um, and I feel that's creating a lot of friction, like unnecessary friction.  I love to be off face with everybody else.  Like I love to be in an environment where I have a lot of time to think about, you know, think and innovate because two years later, I know it's going to be important.  To give you an example, when we started out doing our virtual remote rating work, like the questioner that is online and asks you questions, the Greener Homes program in, by the government of Canada was paying homeowners $500, uh, so that they have somebody go to their home and do an energy assessment using the Hot2000 software.  Like that was the process, everybody was telling us, man, why are you, why are you doing this?  Why are you creating this like remote rating system?  When people get paid 500 bucks to go on site, like, do you hate money?  So what happens was that there was this need to scale this up by orders of magnitude.  And people realize that we don't have enough people.  We don't have enough community knowledge, even about the importance of energy efficiency.  And so we were like, well, why are you doing this?  And we don't have enough money to just like scale this to a scale of millions of homes.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:55:01] No, you can't do it in a linear way.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:55:03] And in the meantime, the government money ran out for the $500.  So at that time we had this virtual rating, remote rating, just fully locked down.  We had like the best platform out there.  We had thought about everything about user interaction, security, uh, data sharing.  And it was so nicely done that we didn't need any private information from you.  And, you know, this is like one of the things is that you need to take out really the occupant behavior out of the rating because you want to think of the homes as an asset that constantly improve regardless of how long of a shower you take or how many bagels you eat.  Going back to your comment about, you know, hard and costly.  No, it shouldn't be about your lifestyle.  It should be about your home regardless of how you want to use it.  Just make a better home.  Right.  So we had all of this locked down.  And then there was this huge, you know, a lot of research towards remote rating.  So we were there to just capture the market.  Now we have, we put a ton of investment into making the LIDAR assessments with those iPhones and iPads, enormous amount of work to make that happen.  And everybody is telling us remote rating is great.  Why are you spending all of those times like putting on site?  No, it's like the pendulum just swings in the, in the direction.  And we know that just in a few years, there is going to be an enormous opportunity, if not in a few months, even enormous opportunities to train enterprising individuals and train the existing body of groups that are inside the industry to take them into homes, talk to the homeowners like doctors for their home and create these roadmaps for home energy upgrades and align everybody together.  You cannot say many things are going on site, even though we were one of the pioneers of that remote rating.  And we should have the white paper that showed like you could get pretty accurate.  We acknowledge that these two things work in lockstep.  Yeah.  And going back to your point about how we approach things, I think we approach things really slowly.  Like we, we try to make sure everybody can go back to their lives at 5 PM.  You know, uh, everybody has a nice weekend and we have.  Reasonable deadlines for things, but instead we focus on being somewhere that we know is going to be impactful, like sharpening our ax really in the beginning.  So really, like a bit of an anti-thesis to break fast, move fast, and break things.  But I can tell you, it works, it works, and it creates healthier, happier work environments, I think.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:57:55] Now, I also think it kind of fits the culture of the industry you're trying to create.  Right.  Yeah, very much.  But the idea of being out of phase is really interesting.  I think I'm going to take that away and think about that some more.  Um, Armand, uh, if somebody wants to learn more about Properate, your work in particular, um, your philosophies on life work and how to do things, uh, where should they go?

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:58:16] So if you want to learn about Properate, our website is Properate.io.  Um, that's where you can even get a energy rating of your home.  You can read some of our, uh, articles in the blog section. Me personally, I have a website called armand.zip.  So A-R-M-A-N.zip.  Uh, so it's a condensed version of my thoughts.  Uh, I don't publish a lot in there, but I will try my best to, you know, uh, document this journey a little bit more, but where I usually have videos and stuff put out is on my LinkedIn.  I have a series of videos about going to COP29, uh, conference, uh, and then making some videos about it.  And, uh, you know, some people found them pretty interesting, but yeah, those are the places to find me and find Properate.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:59:07] Awesome.  Well, hopefully this conversation was a good unzipping of your ideas.  All right, man.  Thanks for coming on.

ARMAN MOTTAGHI

[00:59:14] Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:59:15] Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about.  That was High Agency, like, and subscribe, and we will see you next time.